Tastes Like War

by Grace M. Cho

  During the first few weeks after I turned in my manuscript to the press, when I’d go visit her in New Jersey, she would pull a book from my bag, gaze wondrously at the cover, and ask, “Is this your book?”

  “No,” I’d laugh. “The production process takes a long time.”

  But something else happened when I was thirty-seven, two days after I had gotten the cover design and fantasized about being able to show it to her. “Look, Mom,” I had planned to say. “This is my book.”

  March 9, 2008

  IT WAS AROUND four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. I returned to my home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, after taking my College of Staten Island students to meet with members of a Liberian church as part of our immigration class. My phone rang and I knew something was wrong the moment I saw my brother’s name on the screen. “Shit,” I muttered to myself. What’s going on? I couldn’t remember the last time he had called me for anything other than an emergency.

  “Hello?”

  “Were you here yesterday? Did you see Mom?” The urgency in his voice and the very fact that I was talking to him on the phone caught me off guard.

  “Uh, I don’t remember. Maybe … wait, no … I was there last weekend. Why?” My limbs grew heavy, the way they always did when someone confronted me. My mind was spinning all kinds of different scenarios about what was the matter, yet none of them was as horrible as the truth.

  “Grace, Mom passed away.”

  A searing sensation engulfed my body, the feeling of muscle melting off bone. I struggled to stay upright as the conversation continued. I began to frenetically pace around my one-room studio apartment, trying to flee from the news of my mother’s death. My brother’s words became garbled sounds, and my own words, repeated every few seconds, were like vultures circling above me. “No. It’s not true …”

  When?

  How?

  We never did figure out the answers to these questions. All we knew was where. She died in her living room, and this we knew because her body lay lifeless on the floor, curled up on the fluffy cream-colored rug between the couch and the glass-top coffee table.

  After the call, I picked up Yoyo, my little gray tabby, and pressed my face into his fur. I became all too aware that I lived alone, that so much of my life had revolved around my mother, and now she was gone. Who did I have now? My father had died ten years earlier, my brother and I had been growing apart for years, and my life on the tenure track was so demanding that I had been unable to commit to a romantic relationship since a big breakup in 2004, four years prior. My mother was the person I loved most in the world, had always loved more than anyone. Who could I turn to for solace? I called Hosu and Rafael, my closest friends in New York, but neither of them answered. My instinct was to keep running in circles in that tiny apartment until the sensation of being in my body returned. When it did, I could feel my limbs shaking, my stomach trying to push up bile. Stay calm. Just find someone to keep you from falling apart, I kept telling myself. But other thoughts intruded: What if I had gone to see her yesterday? Maybe I could I have saved her from dying.

  I spent the next few hours alternating between trying to get in touch with my friends and collapsing into the sound of my voice wailing “Umma,” the Korean word for Mama. I hadn’t called her that since I was a young child, but “Umma” was what cried out from my gut. The minutes moved like glaciers while I waited to make contact with someone, anyone. I finally found an ex-lover on Gchat. “Hi, James. Can you do me a favor?” I asked. “Can you please spend the night with me? I’m not interested in sex. I can’t be alone right now. My mother just died.”

  This became one of my coping mechanisms over the following weeks: invite exes to spend the night, seek warmth and comfort in their bodies, use them as barriers against the depths of grief that threatened to drown me. They obliged, and for that I was grateful. But when Aura stroked my hair and said in the most tender voice, “Oh, Grace. You need to be babied. Let me baby you,” I softened into the curves of her body and realized that I was looking for more than a wall against my feelings. I wanted to find my mother’s touch again.

  On the nights when no one was available to hold me, I walked across Flatbush Avenue to one of the budget Chinese spas that had recently opened along Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. “I’d like a one-hour massage, please. From a woman.” In the dark and lavender-scented massage room, I could imagine that this Asian woman who was kneading the pain out of my body was my mother, who used to rub my back as I fell asleep at night and squeeze my legs as I awoke in the morning. I’d close my eyes and slip deeper into the dream that she was there with me. Umma. In the flesh. And not only was she still alive, she was the young mother of my childhood, her mind still intact, her spirit full of wonder. The mother I had lost so long ago.

  When I finally got in touch with Hosu and asked if she would come with me to meet my brother at the mortuary the next morning, she didn’t hesitate to say yes.

  Hosu and I boarded the 8:32 a.m. Northeast Corridor Line train from Penn Station, New York, to Princeton, New Jersey.

  “She asked me for saengseon jeon last weekend,” I said, showing her the package of egg-battered fish that I had picked up in Koreatown. I popped a piece of fish in my mouth and gagged on my tears. Hosu grabbed my hand firmly and held it most of the way. Although she was prepared to go with me every step of the way, we decided that it would be better for her to wait for me in a nearby café in Princeton as my brother and I took care of business.

  In the funeral director’s office, my brother answered nearly all the questions, except for the ones about my mother’s birthplace and parents’ names, which were required for the death certificate. He hesitated, perhaps trying to remember—it was uncommon for Korean children to ever hear their elders’ names—and I seized the opportunity to speak. “She was born in Osaka, Japan.” I then went on to spell out my grandparents’ names. When it came time to make the arrangements, my brother was decisive. She would be cremated, ashes kept in a no-frills plastic box. The funeral home need not provide a service because my brother and his family opted to do something on their own. I was still too shell-shocked from the night before to know exactly what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t the same thing that my brother wanted. The two of us had very different relationships with our mother, and besides, I was an outsider to the family that he and his wife had created. The director must have sensed my dismay and said, “You know, sometimes we divide the ashes to allow family members to honor their departed loved one each in their own way. Would you like to do that?”

  “Yes,” I said, without so much as a pause.

  “Yeah, sure,” my brother shrugged.

  Once we finished our paperwork, the funeral director asked if we wanted to see the body. “Uh, I already saw it. You go ahead,” my brother said to me. I felt his trauma reverberate in his words. What must it have been like for him to walk into our mother’s apartment expecting to see her alive, but then to find her dead on the floor?

  I followed the man downstairs into a dim room where my mother’s body was lying on a metal table. I could see from a distance that she was wearing her pale-green nylon pajamas, and one of her forearms was in the air, fingers spread slightly, and curved into a claw. He walked me to the table and said, “We found a bracelet on her. Maybe you want to remove it.” It was on the arm that was raised. I pulled the gold bangle over her hand and had to push the fingers together slightly to get it off. The stiffness of her fingers and the feeling of her cold skin made it real. My mother was dead. I took a piece of fish out of my bag and said to the director, “I know this might seem weird, but could you send this with her when you cremate her? It’s an offering.”

  “Yes, of course. Would you like a moment alone with her?”

  I nodded and began to cry again as I laid the fish next to her. “I didn’t forget, Mama. I brought you the saengseon jeon.” I repressed my horror and forced myself to caress her cold gray forehead. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” I sobb
ed. Even as I was repeating the words like a mantra, I wondered if she could understand what I was apologizing for, or if I myself could articulate it. I was sorry that her life had been full of struggle, that she lived and died alone, that we were sending her body into the fire with nothing more than a piece of cold fish to usher her into the next world. Yet my regret was also much larger than any of these things. I kept saying the words until they stopped, like a windup clock whose ticking had run out. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry …”

  Outside in the parking lot, my brother was sitting in his black-and-white Jeep Cherokee with the engine on, his hulking figure slightly shrunken behind the wheel. Despite his six-foot-two frame, he looked like a lost little boy. I got into the passenger side, and we drove in silence to the café where Hosu was waiting for me. Silence had become the norm between my brother and me over the years, neither of us making much of an attempt at either small talk or meaningful conversation, but this was different. With Mom gone, when will I ever see him again? I thought to myself. What if this is the last time? The café was only a few blocks away, and my time with him quickly ran out. My body began to tremble as I forced the sound of my voice to break through the silence. Even as I opened my mouth, I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. I only knew that we were both hurting, and that maybe I should say to him what I myself would have wanted to hear. “I want you to know …” My voice was quaking. “I appreciate everything you did for Mom.” He began to shake his head and blink tears away from his amber-brown eyes. I don’t remember if he answered with any words, but his gestures gave form to my feelings. Whatever we might have done for her, it wasn’t nearly enough.

  When I got home that afternoon, FedEx rang my doorbell to deliver the copyedited manuscript of my book. For years I had been writing about the things that made up the social context of my mother’s life in Korea, things she never talked about: the Korean War, civilian life under US militarism and South Korean dictatorship, and all the overt or subtle, yet always systematic, forms of violence against women and girls. I had taken on this project not out of pure intellectual curiosity but because I needed to know what happened to my mother. Or to be more precise, what might have happened to her. What things might have led her to begin hearing voices when I was fifteen? To become a shut-in when I was twenty-three? To spend the rest of her life with virtually no fresh air, sunlight, or human contact? How was it possible that she fell from being the active, vibrant mother of my childhood to the troubled, reclusive mother of my adulthood? And why did no one outside of my family care? I imagined her in every scenario that I wrote about, and wondered if that might have been the thing that pushed her over the edge. My mother was the figurative ghost of my book, and she began haunting me in a new way once she was actually dead. She was no longer the ghost of her own secret past, but the lost mother of my childhood, whispering, Grace-ya, remember me?

  The minutiae of my childhood started to come into focus, and in particular, the details of my first year of school and all the things she did then to chart out my future. The picture came to me in pieces, one of which arrived on my first night back to school, when I was teaching my Food, Self, and Society class.

  I walked in and scanned the room of thirty students, and as usual, only five or six looked alert, while the rest slumped in their chairs. Some were already sleeping.

  I opened the class by writing a quote on the board: Food everywhere is not just about eating, and eating (at least among humans) is never simply a biological process.2

  “Okay, keep this quote in mind as we begin the discussion. Tonight we’re talking about a piece called ‘Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch-Box as ideological state apparatus’ by Anne Allison.3 Allison is borrowing the term ‘ideological state apparatus’ from the philosopher Louis Althusser. Does anyone remember what that means?”

  After a pause, a young Black man in the back raised his hand and said, “It’s when you think you’re doing something of your own free will, but you’re really doing it because you have to.”

  “Good! You’ve touched on how the ISA functions. Now here’s the definition: it’s an institution designed to regulate norms through cultural beliefs and practices rather than brute force. A ‘state apparatus,’ like the police or military, regulates society through force. An ‘ideological state apparatus,’ like the media or school, regulates it through ideas. Just like you said, as soon as you internalize the idea as your own, you don’t notice that someone else wants you to do it,” I said as I scribbled notes on the board. “So now, why does Allison say that the lunch box is an ISA?”

  A tanned twentysomething raised her hand and said, “This story kind of surprised me.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because it didn’t have anything to do with food.”

  Jesus Christ. I silently groaned and wished that I could take a permanent bereavement leave. “Okay, let’s remember the quote on the board. ‘Food’ is more complicated than we might think. This does have something to do with food,” I said with as much patience as I could muster.

  “What these mothers do for their children, it’s amazing,” said Tanya, a plump middle-aged white woman with short gray hair. “They spent so much time making their kids’ lunches that they couldn’t even work outside the home.” She sounded wistful. After twenty years of playing the traditional role of wife and mother, Tanya was finally in college, and she was hungry for knowledge. The Tanyas made teaching worthwhile and, on this particular night, bearable. Without my mother, I started to feel like no one cared that I was a professor.

  “Why do you think the mothers put so much time into their kids’ lunches?” I asked. “Did their five-year-old children care whether the food looked perfect?”

  “Because they love their children,” said one of the struggling students.

  “Sure, but why else? Remember that the institution of the school is invested in the way the mothers make the obento boxes. Allison’s suggesting that it only seems like it’s done out of love, when it might have more to do with politics.”

  “They were becoming education mothers,” said an immigrant student.

  “Yes!” I said, relieved that at least a few students had done the reading. “The kyoiku mama, the ‘education mother,’ whose sole purpose in life is to dedicate herself to her child’s school success. So what’s the link to the obento? Remember that Allison makes a very important point: the school’s biggest emphasis in terms of the child’s potential was not on homework, or something obviously associated with school, but on eating. On food. Such a huge effort on the part of the mothers only makes sense if the obento has some larger meaning. Right?”

  My mind wandered to the email Tanya had written me a week earlier, offering her condolences: I could tell how much your mother meant to you. It was obvious in the way that you talked about her. Until I read those words I hadn’t realized how much I spoke about her in class, or the extent to which my food course was yet another way of paying homage to her, nor had I realized how important the foods she cooked and ate were to her survival.

  “The obento is what holds the key to the child’s transition from home to school. It’s the child’s symbolic entry into citizenship,” I continued as I walked around the room. “And that’s why the state is so invested in the rules of the obento. A child’s early relationship to food helps determine her future, and it’s the mother who makes this happen. The mother who is making the obento that the child is excited to eat at school. The mother who puts so much time and effort into the obento that she’ll inspire her young child to be a good student.”

  At that moment I became hyperaware that my own mother once believed that my academic future was riding on her culinary efforts. The time that she dedicated to food preparation rivaled that of the Japanese mothers, but the difference was that the school system in which I grew up had little stake in my mother’s meal preparation. In that sense, my mother reclaimed the power of the proverbial obento and subjected it to her own will. I had a
lways known that my mother’s cooking transcended familial duty, or a desire to nurture, or a need to satisfy hunger or delight the senses. It was motivated by all of these things, yet there was also something more powerful lurking beneath the surface. She used it to generate income and live in relative peace as a foreigner in a rural town that did not welcome strangers, though I doubt any of these things registered with her. If you had asked her what cooking meant to her, she probably would have said, “It was just something I had to do.”

  I wanted to share these insights with my students and tell them how my mother used to cook as if our lives depended on it, but the lump in my throat hurt too much. The woman whose very body once fed me, whose body I was once a part of, was now a pile of ashes. I swallowed hard and pointed to the quote on the board and said, “So you see, food isn’t just about eating.”

  After class, Sani, a cherub-faced Arab student, offered me a ride back to Brooklyn. We made small talk until we merged onto the Staten Island Expressway, and then she said it: “I’m sorry about your mother, Professor.”

  “Thank you. It was really sudden. I don’t know what it means, but part of me thinks that she was trying to let me go. I spent so many years taking care of her, and I wonder if this was her way of giving me permission to go ahead and live my own life.”

  “Wow. What you’re saying is amazing. I can’t believe it,” she said, her big brown eyes getting bigger. I wasn’t sure which part she was amazed by, but I was grateful that she didn’t shy away from talking about my loss. I surprised myself with my candor, but Sani had been driving me to Bay Ridge every week, and had confided her own struggles with me during the car ride. She was a twenty-one-year-old mother of a toddler and was determined to stay in school “to set a good example,” and her family in Palestine had recently lost their home to a Jewish settlement, a cruel reality that she had been trying to make peace with all semester. I suppose it was my turn to open up to her.